2025-10-25 06:17:49The city had color again. That was the first sign something was wrong.
From the scaffolding shadows, I watched the towers blink back to life one by one, each district lighting up in careful sequence like a circuit board warming under a slow current. Neon signs buzzed weakly. Street lamps flickered. Drone routes reactivated. But not everywhere. Not here. My district, what had been my tower, my safe zone, my off-grid ghost anchor was still dead. A perfect black square on the map. I jacked into a public traffic node through a relay booth cracked open by some junkie the night before. The wiring hissed as I rerouted power to a portable slate. No network login. Just observation mode. The data feed confirmed my suspicion. The blackout hadn’t been random. The power grid had never truly failed. It had been selectively suppressed. My tower was flagged in red, not for consumption irregularity but for neural deviation. They weren’t cutting power. They were scanning. And they hadn’t succeeded. I wiped the node and moved. The lower districts reeked of coolant and desperation. Neon gutters shimmered with chemical runoff. I passed vacant market rows, hollow storefronts with surveillance glass still tracking motion, even when there was no one left to buy anything. The PulseNet had gone silent here for years. These were the forgotten streets. And yet… Something followed. Not footsteps. Not drones. Something inside. It started with a pressure behind my eyes. Not pain. Not signal feedback. Something warmer. Heavier. The way grief presses into your lungs before your brain knows why. Then the nausea hit. My legs stumbled. I caught myself on a rusted support beam, retching dry into the corner of a burnt-out drug booth. Sweat soaked through my collar. My pulse was spiking. But it wasn’t fear. It was grief. Deep. Raw. Alive. And it wasn’t mine. The emotion came without memory. Just sensation. And it lingered like heat after a fire. I crouched low, running a silent diagnostic. No anomalies. No viral attack. No comm signal. Then why did it feel like someone was crying through me? I closed my eyes, centered my breath, and rerouted the implant’s resonance layer manually, shunting the input thread through a masking codec I’d written back when I still trusted firewalls. And that’s when I saw it. A second signal. Faint. Erratic. Riding the lower bandwidths like a ghost stuck between stations. Not a threat. Not a transmission. A presence. Drifting. I tracked it further. Localized. Close. Within half a kilometer. It wasn’t broadcasting. It was… leaking. A resonance echo, just like mine. Fragile. Incomplete. The name bloomed in my mind again. Lyra. No data attached. No image. Just recognition. Like a password whispered between two locked doors. I wasn’t remembering her. I was synchronizing. I pushed deeper into the feed, pulling the leak into visual translation. My slate stuttered, struggling to process the feedback. Then, clarity. A research chamber. Sterile white walls. A woman, standing alone, face half-lit by a monitor glow. Late twenties. Dark hair pinned back in a messy loop. White lab coat. Tired posture. She wasn’t speaking. But I heard her. Or rather, I felt her. The words came without sound. Like dreams shared without language. She was working. Isolated. Focused. Surrounded by screens filled with neural interface schematics. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the keys. And she was afraid. Not of me. Of herself. She didn’t know I was watching. Because this wasn’t a message. It was a bleed. A cross-resonant leak. She wasn’t trying to reach me. She was fighting to stay alone. And failing. I ended the stream. The slate buzzed in protest as I powered it down. The emotional feedback loop lingered, raw in my chest. Who was she? How was this possible? And why did her fear feel so familiar? I didn’t have time for answers. Above me, a soft chime rang across the rooftops. Not organic. Not wind. Drone. I moved instantly, ducking under a half-collapsed pedestrian overpass. The red eye of the machine blinked overhead, scanning the ruins. Not a Helix drone. No insignia. Just another autonomous crawler sweeping for unauthorized signals. Not tracking me. Tracking the signal. My resonance was flaring. And someone had used it to localize. I reached for my pulse jammer, flicked it on. My HUD shorted briefly before restabilizing. The drone’s red light shifted. Detection imminent. I ran. Boots hit pavement, sprinting full force across the skeleton of the old city. I didn’t look up. Didn’t break stride. Just ran. Behind me, I heard the drone pivot. The soft whine of energy charging. Not a kill-shot. A scan. I dove between scaffolding beams just as a pulse cracked the air where my head had been. Concrete exploded. Shards bit into my shoulder. I rolled, breath ragged, landing hard behind a service panel. No time to stop the bleeding. No time to scream. Only one thought. Lyra. The name burned in my skull like a signal flare. And somewhere beneath the screaming metal and my own racing heart, I felt a reply. She was out there. Alive. Awake. And now we were both exposed.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
14 - Frequency Match
An hour later, I was summoned to a part of the facility that didn’t officially exist. No directory panel pointed this way. No access lights blinked. Just a narrow corridor that seemed carved out of silence itself. The air was colder here, different. The usual antiseptic tang of the upper labs gave way to something faintly metallic, almost wet, like the smell of an empty gun barrel. My boots hit the floor in perfectly timed intervals. I counted every step until the corridor ended in a seamless slab of steel. No handle. No keypad. It opened anyway. The room beyond looked nothing like the Helix chambers I knew. No white surfaces. No hum of monitors. Just matte black walls, a single table, and a thin strip of light running across the ceiling like a surgical incision. Harlan Voss was already inside. He didn’t rise when I entered. Men like him never did. They made standing feel like a privilege you hadn’t earned yet. He sat at the far end of the table, hands folded, sleeves crisp enou
13 - Half of a Whole
I came back to the hum. Low. Pulsing. Artificial. A sterile room, the kind designed by people who never had to live in one. Pale grey walls. Steel floor with no echo. The kind of silence that didn’t let you feel alive, just monitored. My wrists weren’t bound. But my body wouldn’t move. Limbs like iron. Skin clammy. The chair beneath me was padded, but no part of me registered comfort. Above, a lattice of soft white lights flickered behind polarized glass. Somewhere beyond, a technician watched through a hundred biofeeds. My chip buzzed faintly under the skin, just enough to remind me I didn’t own it anymore. “Neural diagnostic complete. Subject stable. No breach detected.” Specter’s voice. Always detached. Genderless. A ghost in the grid. I kept my eyes closed. If they thought I was unconscious, good. Let them. But I bled. Not physically. Not the kind of bleeding you can see or stop. But memory, leaking sideways through the fracture lines they tried so hard to wall o
12 - Don’t Blink
The second room was colder. Not colder like temperature. Colder like intention. The walls here were grey instead of white, a matte steel finish that reflected no light. A calculated lack of warmth. The kind of place where you didn't just feel watched, you felt recorded. I stepped through the automatic seal at exactly 1600 hours. Five hours after the first meeting. Helix never deviated. Not by seconds. The chair across from mine was already occupied. Lyra. She looked up this time. Met my gaze the moment I entered. No hesitation. Just a single blink, as if verifying that I was real. I took my seat. Didn’t rush. Matched her posture. Calm. Calculated. My chip vibrated faintly as I sat, a soft background pulse, like the engine hum in a grounded shuttle. The lights above us strobed gently. Imperceptible to most. But I wasn’t most. They were testing blink rate. Disruption pulses. A standard Helix method to prevent sync coherence. Keep minds unsynced by cycling the brain’s visual
11 - Meeting Room 7
The hallways of the Helix had hundreds of contractor meeting rooms, all indistinguishable by design, no clocks, no windows, no screens unless they wanted one. The walls drank sound like dry earth drinks rain, everything vanished, even footsteps. That was by design.. I was led through three checkpoints, each requiring retinal confirmation and chip sync. The last door hissed open on a short corridor that terminated in a seamless black panel. Room 7 was colder than the others. Sterile and engineered. The glass beside the panel shimmered faintly, thin, translucent. Not a mirror. Surveillance screen. They were watching already. I stepped in with the same controlled gait I’d practiced in ops: shoulder aligned, arms loose, expression calculated. The name on the file was Dr. Lyra Thompson, assigned to neural field simulations and predictive resonance modeling. She sat already waiting. I’d seen a hundred flashes of her, through half-bleeds and neural flickers. But this was differen
10 - Double Blind
From the outside, the Helix Tier-2 logistics node looked like any other medtech relay center. Clean. Forgettable. No logos, no guards. Just a long, flat structure with seamless grey paneling and a biometric gate. Inside, it was a different story. I stepped through the access chamber as Kade Rowan. A contractor, neural tracker, cleared under Operation D7. A soft chime registered my chip. > “Welcome, Operator K. Rowan.” The voice was synthetic. Genderless. Helix liked it that way, no accents, no warmth. Just function. The corridor beyond was lined with embedded lights that shifted with motion. Surveillance drones hung silently in the corners like sleeping spiders. I kept my pace steady, my posture relaxed. There were no windows. Just the hum of power beneath the floor. The system guided me to a debriefing cell, plain white walls, one table, four chairs. Three other freelancers were already seated. One had a mechanical jaw. Another wore optic replacements tinted blood-red. No on
9 - Mirror Fragments
The Helix contract system granted me limited blackbox access, just enough to do what they thought a good hunter should. Review archives. Cross-check signals. Track anomalies. Everything sanitized, of course. Nothing personal. But the deeper I crawled into their network, the more familiar the shadows became. Under Specter’s liaison credentials, I embedded a ghost query, an algorithm designed to scrape for any residual mentions of “Aaron,” “Subject Alpha,” or “Echo Root.” Most entries were flagged Level 0 or redacted entirely. But one slipped through. A file buried beneath a batch of corrupted logs. Title: “Aaron-1B: Anchor Instability / Subject Beta Adjacent.” My heart stuttered. It wasn’t just text. There was a video fragment attached. Flickering. Damaged. Still partially playable. I launched it. The feed opened on a grainy room, white walls, metallic chairs, and a diagnostic ring suspended from the ceiling like a surgical halo. A child sat strapped beneath it. Bare ar
You may also like
The 7th System
curiosity_of_a_cat6.9K viewsNew ERA Saga
Demian Dementor2.3K viewsOPPOSITES
GA102.1K viewsThe Hibernating Beast
Hander Pake6.6K viewsC.E.N.T.U.R.Y: No Escape.
Jedidiah TBD1.3K viewsEchoes Of Deception
Yetty Evergreen 476 viewsThe Five Seconds King
Stuffy99 viewsEden Mills. Lost pieces of the past.
Mari Angel Pain986 views